Work Text:
The first thing that settles into the edges of Viktor's soul, or what's left of it, is the silence. It's overwhelming—the weight that the absence of everything holds. Viktor's own memories are faint, dulled by the years spent as One of Many, the leader of all, connected to all, yet nothing at all at the same time. Being entrapped and emotionless was a comfort. It was peace—until time, and nothing other than time, began to chip at the edges.
Stagnation.
Viktor learned until there was nothing left to learn. He reached out until there was no-one left to reach out to. He took, and took, until the world forgot what war was, or until it forgot who it was.
At first, there was a comfort in collective. A mindless bliss that encapsulated them all. Viktor couldn't feel the relief from the others, but he knew it was there. He knew he was releasing all of the pain, the disease, the debilitating restrictions and addictions that plagued them. He knew it as soundly as he knew that he was doing what was right, and just, and the salvation that he and Jayce had always wished for.
Jayce. Viktor realizes, during a dawn in a day in a year he can't recall the number of, that he's forgotten the sound of Jayce's voice.
A minor detail, he knows. But sometimes he sits by the warped shell of his former partner's former body for no discernible reason at all. Nostalgia is an emotion and Viktor had emptied himself of those a long time ago. The last one departed with Sky—or at least the image of her.
But he sits. There's no where else to go, Viktor reasons, because he's traveled to the end of the world and back, empowered by the arcane to teleport himself through space and time whenever and wherever he pleases. He supposes he could go back to relieve his memories from afar but that also would require some wish, some kind of desire, to seek out the pleasure of the experience. Besides, it was a risk. Too much contact and he could make an irreparable rift in time—set forth a chain of events trapping them in a recursive loop, or even possibly eradicating them all.
So he sits.
The last animals and creatures left chirp and crawl around him. Even without people around, the world continues to spin, the grass continues to grow. The blast residue paints the city a grim web of gray and glimmering metal. His own body parallels the same: cold, heavy, sparse.
He can't be cold anymore. Viktor remembers nights spent shivering in the Undercity, wishing for thicker walls, praying for heavier blankets. No child would be left to freeze any longer. No child would be left—
"Viktor?"
He whips around, startled by the sound of a voice. His heart pounds. His blood thrums—but when he turns, there's nothing there except for his old partner, unchanging and forever collapsed in defeat. Jayce has joined the collective, the glorious revolution, but once the revolution had done its work he was no longer Jayce. What Viktor faces is no more than a ghost in his own head but he finds himself gasping, seized by the sudden need to breathe. It's as if every human function he'd forgotten to do returned with violent force. Air in his lungs, blood in his veins, a heartbeat, sound in his ears, a break in the stillness, a revelation.
When Viktor falls to his knees, his mask crumbles and falls to the grass below him. His face, hidden for so long, revealed to the sun.
As hard as Viktor tries to grasp at the feeling, to hold onto it and never let go, it slips away as quickly as it came.
Is that all it takes, he wonders. A single thing of a nature he can't begin to name nor understand.
A single act to change the course of time.
No—it won't be. Viktor lets the remains of his mask turn into ashes swept away by the wind and leaves before the urge to indulge in this farce of sentimentality leads to any further hallucinations. There's no point or purpose to them.
What's done can't be undone.
—
When the disease progressed to his bones, or what felt like it, Viktor used to pray for a moment of reprieve. A magic pill that could erase the pain, chase away the perpetual clouds that refused to pass. He forgot how it felt to live without it and adjusted to his new normal with resignation and grit teeth. Though—he didn't give up. He had opportunities, thoughts, moments on the edge, ones that he'd pulled himself away from, ones that others had pulled him away from, but an undeniable feeling persisted through it all. Viktor once thought that feeling was his ingenuity—the intelligence, brilliance, and drive, that allowed him to crawl his way out of Zaun and into a position as high as his was in Piltover.
But that isn't quite the right word for it. Viktor knows now only because he has to go on without it.
The pain is gone. He's forgotten how it felt before. He doesn't miss it—no one would.
Isn't that what wanted, he wonders. To heal the world. To cure the un-curable, to fix all imperfection, to live a life he once only dreamed of and gift it to others—freedom from the ravages of shimmer addiction, from all pain and all suffering, from anguish and disease. Viktor's done the unthinkable. He's succeeded.
Yet, as he wanders through the place he once called home, there is a hollow nature to his victory.
Viktor returns, as he always does, to Jayce's side. Of all the shells left behind, Jayce's somehow still looks undeniably like his despite how all individualism should've been wiped away. Maybe it's the hammer, or the pose of him hunched over in defeat, or Viktor is clinging to something to soften his solitude. He places a hand on Jayce's shoulder then, flinches and draws it back, like a hand to fire.
He must be imagining the sudden warmth. Viktor touches him again, and this time all that's left is cool metal.
"This must not be what you imagined you would become, old... friend." He speaks to him even though he knows he can't hear.
Friends. Partners. An undeniable something. What do you call it, Viktor wonders, the person in your life—or who once was in your life—who saved your life, and tried to end it? Who, in partnership, created the very thing that you've become, but also tried to destroy it? It's irony, Viktor thinks. He once wished so sincerely that the hexcore be destroyed. He once looked at Jayce with disappointment and disdain for not letting him die.
But that persistence. Viktor traces the rotting, metallic, webbed edges of Jayce's frame. It can't be denied.
"You were always so stubborn." Long nights spent debating, arguing, inventing, creating something entirely new fueled only by the desire to lessen some of the suffering in the world. Jayce didn't understand what it was like to be from the Undercity—to be labeled and doomed from the moment of his marked birth, to struggle and strive and look up and wonder if he could claim, if he deserved, the clean air up above. He didn't understand, yet he looked at him like no one else in Topside did.
Viktor wouldn't disrespect his memory by claiming it was out of some altruistic benevolence that allowed Jayce to look past their differences.
No, it was something else.
It was—him. He looked at him, the core of him, the Viktor beneath all of his guards and layers.
"How?"
Silence.
"Why?"
It was too late for answers. Taken by a swell of frustration, Viktor stands and throws his staff aside, letting it clatter to the floor. He should be relishing the feeling of being able to stand without its help, but all he's left with is bitterness.
All these questions, and no one to answer them. All this time, and no one to spend it with.
"It is not the desire to gloat," Viktor spits out, "or for glory." He had never wanted to be celebrated.
But, to be remembered. That was different. And now, all he had was the memories of others while his own faded into oblivion.
"—Viktor." The sound slaps him across the face, and Viktor spins. His eyes search for a sign of life. That sound, he knows it.
"Jayce?" The hope in his throat is undeniable. He shouldn't be allowed to hope, not when this reality is of his own doing, not when he knows he's done the right thing and it's for the good of all, even if Jayce doesn't understand—stubborn as he was until the very end of it all, resisting down to his very last breath. Viktor searches Jayce's cold form for signs of movement until he realizes that it might not be here, but instead could be through the arcane. He closes his eyes, returning to the sea of golden threads.
A sight once comforting turns into horror. They all look the same. It'll be improbable—impossible—to find Jayce's through them all. Still, he tries, sifting through them at starlight speed, searching for anything familiar that could distinguish one from the rest.
A glow. A pulse—Viktor dives forward and seizes the string, one bright than the rest, and the light floods him.
Memories, fast and swift, flying through his mind's eye, starting from the end of Jayce's life to the very beginning. Jayce's emotions crash into him, hot, bright, and sweet, choking him with how quickly they rush through him. Viktor thought the end would be all resentment and rage. Instead, he finds a pure clarity of an emotion that he can't name. The memories speed backwards: the choking grief after the explosion, the nerves of standing at the council's table, the thrilling joy of invention, the despair of wanting to take that next step over the ledge, the first time their eyes meet, then a Jayce before Viktor met him—the diligent solitude of working alone, the ups and downs of youth, the weight of the inheritance of his family's house on his shoulders, the distance between himself and the ones above him, the moment a boy became a man, and—
—that boy, only a boy, alone in the snow, before a hooded figure.
Viktor gasps, wrenched away against his own will, and now emptier than before.
The glow is gone. The threads sway in cosmic solitude, mocking him with their uniformity.
Jayce, is gone.
Viktor knows what he must do.
—
The first time Viktor travels that far back in time and finally finds Jayce, a small dot in the snow, is thrilling. It's also an absolute failure. In that universe he still wins, and Viktor watches from the shadows and sidelines as the world, once again, turns perfect.
He curses. He tries again. He fails again.
The third time around, Viktor considers what would happen if he didn't give Jayce a rune at all. The boy would die—his mother too. A forgotten pile of corpses in the wilderness, lost, yes, mourned, yes, but also the crux of hextech and the key to changing the outcome of the fates of all society. Logic tells him to do it, like how logic told Jayce to destroy the hexcore.
They were always similar in the worst ways.
Viktor walks up and tries again. He shuffles through the runes, one by one, patiently living through the timeline of each universe to the very end to see if anything changes. He lives each life, again and again, replaying the events and watching the delicate balance of dominos fall and tumble every which way only to end up in the same place. He grows even older, though he's not sure how he ages. Self perception, maybe. The arcane convincing itself that appearances have to change to mark the passage of time.
He watches himself suffer and strive and float among the rudimentary cosmic stars he once thought were revolutionary. He loses track of the years and startles himself with his own reflection, grey and worn as he is. He loses himself in the dreamless sleep of repetition—'Hey V, what was that thing you used to say? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? I'm pretty sure that's us. Officially insane.'—until, on a day like any other, an anomaly appears.
A person. A real, living, breathing, person, in this universe, transported here to the place where no one has lived for a very long time. Viktor heads over to the plains, willing himself not to rush. If he needed air, he's sure he'd be gasping for it. If he had a working heart, he's sure it would stop once he finally caught sight of an all too familiar figure.
Hope. This is what hope feels like—it's been too long. Viktor cautions himself, using all of his patience to lead Jayce where he must go without prematurely revealing the truth. All of these trials and universes did teach him the the importance of allowing the flow of fate by stepping back and watching the little coincidences and sparks of cause and effect to proceed without his influence. Even when things looked grim, even if all of the others failed. Viktor knows.
This could be the one.
He enjoys the chase for as long as he's allowed to have it. He watches Jayce fall and struggle. He watches him climb. He waits. He takes in the look of dawning realization on Jayce's face as he gazes at his own corpse.
There are too many things Viktor wants to say, and too little time. Too many possibilities of how the wrong words, or failing to say the right ones, could forsake this timeline too. For one selfish moment, Viktor wonders if he could convince Jayce to stay. His company would end this dreamless solitude, even if it would doom the rest of the world. He could keep him to himself—only his.
But, Viktor knows that the drive burning in Jayce's eyes is the will to save them all, and the state of his own existence is his own fault. If they didn't desire so sincerely to help others around them, they wouldn't be in this situation.
Viktor speaks—not from his own heart, but from the memory of what remained in Jayce's before his glow faded.
And just like that, Jayce is gone.
Viktor sits, not out of need but out of nostalgia and comfort. He leans against Jayce's side, favoring what was once his good leg out of nothing more than habit. He misses his old body, the one capable of feeling the sweet warmth of another beside it.
"It is done," Viktor sighs out into the air, closing his eyes and searching for his own dark quiet instead of the cosmic collective.
Viktor has a theory. One that's kept him going through the insanity of his experiments—a scientist until the end—a faint imitation of a goal fueled by passion. His theory is that the arcane, or as he better understands it now the anomaly, stretches throughout all of the universes where his glorious evolution has succeeded. The arcane has no desire to create what Viktor has done. But the anomaly, a twisted aberration of the arcane's powers, stretches far and wide—and remains interconnected.
This means, Viktor estimates, that an eradication of one will mean the eradication of all.
This means, Viktor thinks, as he sinks into a soundless, satisfied, peace, that if Jayce succeeds, he too will be gone.
This means, Viktor knows, that—